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Carter Hall Spring

April 25, 2016

Downstream of Project Hope’s Carter Hall spring, students from Ms. Robin Coutts lower school science class at Powhatan School released trout fry they had raised from eggs into Spout Run. For the last several years, the school has participated in Trout Unlimited’s “Trout in the Classroom” program as part of an environmental science curriculum focused on habitat and water quality.

Bordered by Spout Run and Page Brook, Powhatan is ideally situated in the heart of the Spout Run watershed. In 2011, the school received a donation of 46.8 acres along Spout Run (Crocker Conservancy) which will be in perpetual easement for education and recreation. This will allow the school to expand is focus on environmental science and nature study.

Releasing trout back into the wild is a small but symbolic event culminating three years of restoration work in this stretch of the stream by Trout Unlimited and the C Spout Run partnership. Work has included extensive stream bank restoration to reduce sedimentation and numerous tree plantings by volunteers to restore habitat and tree cover — all to help protect and cool the waters. Hopefully, these trout fingerlings will now find suitable conditions to grow and reproduce.

It was a crisp November morning and over 20 volunteers from Clarke County and the surrounding community gathered on the banks of Spout Run to plant over 150 native trees and shrubs to improve habitat and do their part to restore this unique spring creek. On the heels of the stream restoration work completed in May, this volunteer tree planting was one of the last steps for this targeted restoration project on Spout Run near Carter Hall. Passionate volunteers young and old, including many TU members, enjoyed getting their hands a little dirty to make a difference for clean water. Thirteen species of trees and shrubs—all native to VA—were planted including American hazelnut, pin oak, black gum, and red osier dogwood.

Prior to this project, this reach of Spout Run suffered from unstable streambanks and signification streambank erosion. In the long term, the streambank stabilization and instream habitat restoration activities completed in May will be successful once a riparian buffer is established. Permanent rooted vegetation along streambanks is the most important factor for stream stability in the Shenandoah Valley. The trees these dedicated volunteers planted will help hold the streambanks in place, provide shade to the stream and cover for native brook trout.

Funding for this project was made possible by a grant from the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, with support from Rapidan and Winchester Chapters of Trout Unlimited, and Project Hope.

A potentially record-breaking and damaging storm surge came down Spout Run earlier this month along with monsoon rains, just two days after this restored reach of Spout Run at Carter Hall spring below Millwood had been staked and seeded.

The Downstream crew joined stream restoration specialists, Seth Coffman and James Fulcher from Trout Unlimited, to document how well the site and intended improvements held up. It is estimated that over 130 cubic yards of sediment were deposited over the newly established flood plain area and kept from washing further downstream to the Shenandoah River and ultimately the Chesapeake Bay.

We love it when a plan comes together. Congratulations to Seth and James for a great design and execution.

In May of 2013, we captured video of Seth and James Fulcher recording topographic information as we witnessed the severity of the vertical and incised banks which contribute heavily to the sedimentation of the stream. The before-and-after segments in the latest video journal entry show the remarkable improvement and future benefits of this work in progress.

For the past few weeks, Gem Bingol of the Piedmont Environmental Council (PEC) has been wading into the waters of Westbrook and Roseville Runs with citizen volunteers to monitor stream health. She and her volunteers share some of their experiences in a new video produced by The Downstream Project.

Both Westbrook and Roseville Run feed into Spout Run, a tributary of the Shenandoah River that is on Virginia’s Impaired Waters list for bacteria and for aquatic life. “Impaired” means that bacteria pollution levels in Spout Run are so high, it doesn’t meet state or federal standards for fishing or swimming. The stream also has so much sediment that many bottom-dwelling insects and other small creatures eaten by fish can’t survive. With leadership from PEC, The Downstream Project (TDP), Friends of the Shenandoah and other community partners, Clarke County citizens are now working to restore the watershed as part of the C-Spout Run restoration project, and remove it from the Impaired Waters list by 2025.

With input from local residents and these groups, the state of Virginia has come up with a plan to restore Spout Run. The plan is now underway, but judging its success will be difficult without some indicators along the way. That’s where citizen monitoring comes in. Gem and her teams are looking for benthic macroinvertebrates – insects, crustaceans, worms, snails and clams that live on the bottom of streams – to see what kind of life Spout Run and its tributaries currently support. As Gem explains in the TDP video below, some macroinvertebrates are more tolerant of pollution than others. When she and her volunteers find a lot of critters that are tolerant, and few that are intolerant, she knows that stream conditions are harming aquatic life and will need to be improved to restore the watershed. Benthic macroinvertebrate monitoring is particularly useful because it reveals not only the health of the streams, but also the health of the surrounding land in the watershed. Sensitive stream creatures need all the components of a healthy stream ecosystem, including shade trees and plants along waterways. When a watershed doesn’t have enough vegetation along its streams, many benthic macroinvertebrates will disappear.

But crawly creatures aren’t the only way to measure stream health. As volunteer (and a director of the Lord Fairfax Soil and Water Conservation Service) Wayne Webb notes in the video, Friends of the Shenandoah River has been measuring actual pollution levels at key monitoring locations on the Shenandoah for years. Those pollutants include nitrogen, phosphorus and sediment from fertilizer, livestock and erosion. Collecting both kinds of information at the same sites in Spout Run over time will help identify baseline conditions, point to potential sources of the problems, and reveal if corrective measures solve the problems.

It takes a lot of feet to cover the 14 miles of stream in the Spout Run watershed. To attend a training session and become a citizen scientist contact Gem Bingol at gbingol@pecva.org or visit the FOSR website.

In this video excerpt, experts from Blandy, Lord Fairfax Soil and Water Conservation District and Master Naturalists shared information about sustainable landscaping and yard care practices, garden ecology and backyard habitat creation—with an emphasis on Monarch butterflies. Discover how and why you can benefit by changing the way you care for your property and how that can help the local environment as we work to clean up Spout Run in Clarke County.

Follow this blog post and check out the video of students at Powhatan School, with the help of Mark Zimmerman of Trout Unlimited, celebrate the release of several young “fingerling” brook trout, raised from eggs in the classroom, into Spout Run. Tracy Smith, who served as the parent coordinator of this valuable educational program, explains the importance of this 7th grade service project.

This flagship program of Trout Unlimited’s Youth Education efforts, Trout (or Salmon) in the Classroom (TIC or SIC) offers students of all ages a chance to raise salmonids in a classroom setting and then release them into a nearby stream or river. Caring for the fish starts to foster a conservation ethic in the students, and the act of walking to a streambank and directly releasing the fish into the water makes a concrete connection between caring for the fish and caring for the water.

Stream restoration specialists, Seth Coffman and James Fulcher, from Trout Unlimited take elevation and survey measurements to develop a targeted restoration plan for the stream below Millwood at Carter Hall.

Tall vertical banks contribute a tremendous amount of sediment to Spout Run and the restoration plan will ease the height and slope in targeted locations. Plantings will also help to stabilize the ground to minimize soil erosion.

The Spring weather cooperated last weekend as Gem Bingol of the Piedmont Environmental Council (PEC) led the streamside segment of her certification course in benthic macroinvertebrate testing. A certification exam was administer at the conclusion of the class.

The C Spout Run partnership has been recruiting volunteers to help monitor the health of our streams by checking the numbers and types of aquatic species that live in them. These certified volunteers will help gauge the effectiveness of efforts to bring back the watershed by sampling the animal life at various points several times a year.

Congratulations and thank you to our new class of certified volunteers. We look forward to sharing baseline and ongoing testing data with the Spout Run community as this project progresses.

The Virginia Department of Forestry receives grant funds from U.S. Forest Service Region-8 for the purchase and planting of tree seedlings in impaired watersheds. The grant, called “Trees for TMDL”, is distributed by the Virginia Department of Forestry to partners looking to install riparian buffers. Clarke County was the recipient of a generous gift of $2,000. These funds were used to plant over 200 seedlings in the Spout Run watershed at Boyce Elementary School, Powhatan School, and the Burwell Morgan Mill. Conservation Services, Inc. performed the planting.